There is an increasing interest in automated packaging systems as labor costs rise and as robotic machines become more sophisticated. The interest is particularly keen in the area of food packaging where sanitation concerns are paramount.
An obstacle to automated packaging in the food processing field is the tendency for the objects to be packaged to have irregular shapes or orientations as they are arranged on a pick-up site such as a conveyor belt. This obstacle has been lessened with the advent of better computer aided vision recognition systems which examine the pick-up site with a video camera and then digitize and process the image to identify the objects and to determine their location and orientation. Such a method for use with a moving conveyor belt pick-up site is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,041,907.
Various methods for sorting utensils are common in the prior art. Many of these methods rely on the magnetic attraction of metal utensils to a magnet, including U.S. Pat. No. 4,744,469 by Swallert; U.S. Pat. No. 4,782,970 by Edwards; U.S. Pat. No. 4,706,818 by Zutell; U.S. Pat. No. 4,367,138 by Kustas; U.S. Pat. No. 3,926,792 by Buford; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,877,577 by Richard. Other methods use mechanical manipulation that causes utensils of different sizes and shapes to be routed to different sorting bins, including U.S. Pat. No. 4,954,250 by Weihe; U.S. Pat. No. 4,485,927 by Corsmeier; U.S. Pat. No. 3,956,109 by Dietsche; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,883,422 by Ettlinger.
A limitation on prior art methods utilizing mechanical sortation is that they do not operate except with the few utensil configurations for which they were designed. The use of the machines for other utensil configurations generally requires changes to the mechanical sortation design. Another limitation is that they will sort utensils by type, but then the sorted utensils generally must be recombined in some manner to be packaged as in a package containing a knife, fork and spoon. A limitation to the magnetic methods is that they generally do not sort by utensil type, but merely separate magnetic utensils from material which is not magnetic.
It can be seen that there is a need for a system that will sort utensils by type and in which the system is easily adaptable to accommodate utensils of various configurations. Preferably, the system would include a means for distributing the utensils in such a way as to maximize the sorting efficiency. Also, the system should combine the sorted utensils in a predetermined way and place the recombined sorted utensils in such a way to allow them to be packaged, preferably without the intermediate step of collecting utensils of a given type into a collection bin. The system could be coordinated with other machines to add other elements to the utensil package and to bag the package.